Setting Demands and Needs (Gregory)

OpenTEAM
1

What is the world demanding of us in terms of technology? What do we have to live up to? Take some time to think about that…

Reflections:

  • Scientific integrity must be present
  • Tech helps ag experience a transition from ‘growing’ to ‘cultivating’

What is our society / communities / demanding from us, in our current (post-truth, etc.) era. For creating ecosystem service markets, scientific instruments, etc.

Reflections:

  • More demand for tech that acknowledges environmental requirements, is new. But the way we share + update science is old. There’s a lack of consciousness (especially in certain countries) around what’s the real problem and how to solve it. So building consciousness, but also showing that it’s possible.
  • Demands for new markets, delivering sharing and privacy, delivering more information, etc. etc.

What are the pragmatic user needs? Hold a user that you are currently relating to or building for.

Now break into groups and continue to fill out these key questions

Responses are below, additional summary from what people said:

**Group 1 (daniela): **

Sustainability is lack of information
what we want is to make the sustainable choices, the obvious ones, and it’s clear what the negative consequences are and associated feedback.

opposite is also true - information alone is not a behavior change make!
The human connection + relationship is key to solve this idea

Group 2: (dan)

Ease of use is key - having people start and quit is bad bad bad.
Accessible, transparent, and trustworthy.

Group 3: (christian)

what’s at stake? Huge suffering is possible and an unpleasant picture of the future of humanity. There’s cultural potential in which our work is a real opportunity. Food and ag represents a good place to engage that opporunity.

Group 4: (Greg)

What can we do? Encode the earth’s response in human systems (especially data systems) so that humans can ‘hear’ the earth in conversation, and decide to make change. There’s incentivized (carbon credits), automated (control the tractor / methods), enforced (taxes, etc.), and voluntary (people’s personal beliefs).

Group 5

Farmers are in rapid flux (size, number, design, etc.). We can’t do it all, even in this group… where should we target and put our efforts (prioritization)… What’s the most bang for our buck (maybe small holders in terms of impact??

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Maria, Crystal, Mike, Daniella, Gisel, Rex

Reflections:

Societies’ Demands
Serving human needs; keeping farmers on the land; making farming profitable
Nurturing instead of growing
Information about what can be done to be more sustainable and profitable
Data integrity and moving science forward in a way that is cost effective
Being honest and transparent about where the science is and the limits of our scientific knowledge
Unsustainability is a lack of information - increase knowledge of what [fill in the user] can or cannot do
Make the science open and accessible - unlock the data from
Generating insights and creating transparency for many types of users
Do no harm - ecologists as physicians (Aldo Leopold); agriculturalist’s hypocratic oath
Food is at the center of what we do
The risk of building the platform; the risk of not building the platform

Pragmatic User Needs:
Getting information to flow seamlessly
Financial payments for enhancing ecosystem function
Understanding technical systems
Methodology - standards
Recommendations and learning from the past

3

Jason, Zia, Carl, Justin, Patrick

  1. What is the world demand from technology?
    — use it for better communication, for people need to live in harmony
    —use tech to change paradigms in a way that wouldn’t
    be possible without it. e.g. shift from short term thinking.
    — use tech to support transformation that is sustainable but also productive — esp. in poor countries (yields, productivity, income)
    —Use it to more from an industrial agricultural mind set
    — Cross-scale analysis. And beyond political boundaries.

  2. What does society demand from technology?
    —Could be seen as same as previous question
    — the ability to actually use these tools
    — demand to create a demand . Communicate better the importance of the sustainability and get it the top of the agenda
    — Communication the solutions, not just the problems.
    — all tools have trade-offs so we need better assessment of the implications of the use of tools for people at multiple scales. Due diligence. Ethics. e.g. PES schemes can turn bad with wrong incentives. Dark UX.
    — relevance
    — adoption: so many tools out there.Some tools quite complex and difficult to work with. Need to develop API’s to deal with legacy of adoption of other tech.
    — difficult to get around/deal with all of the different farming systems, in different contexts, different economics, needs mindsets. THIS is a key issue b/c you can’t develop for everyone simultaneously. And the issue of trade-offs .Should we be targeted to the worst locations (e.g. the most polluting) or the most people (e.g. smallholders in poor countries?)
    — A lot of GHGe tool adoption is supply chain driven
    — How to develop for the future? What are the problems of the future, some contexts/countries the farming landscapes are evolving really fast
    — Better partnerships? Academia is not agile enough.

  3. What are the pragmatic user needs?
    — entering less data
    — grow more food, raise livelihoods
    — better access to internet, ender equality smart phone , access to phones
    — identification of pests and response to them
    — data privacy. Supply chain transparency vs. Data anonymization. Land acquisition and ownership. Environmental impacts.

4

Julit, Greg, Craig, Jamie, Aaron

What is the world demanding of us in terms of technology? What do we have to live up to? Take some time to think about that…

Juliet - Responsibility to the planet, others.
Greg - if I were gaia, I would say either humans die, or integrate me so we can work together. Right now it’s like having a terrible roommate and not talking about the problems.
Daniel S. - feels that humans could help make the earth a beautiful place. We need to integrate what the planet wants.

  • Make mountains and rivers have legal entities, so that humans can represent their interests. This is kind of an example of how to do this…
    Craig - like Client Earth (some lawyers in the UK).
    Ciaron - well, you can have a subgoup of humans represent the earth
    Juliet - feels that tech hasn’t been successful in ‘showing people’ their impact that results in change. It’s more about the social construct (stories).
  1. Tech cannot save the world. But we can make really good hammers, and hammers designed and human AND earth centered design and interfaces (natural systems centered design). How can we better have a conversation with the earth, so earth has the ability to ‘put pause’ on activities when needed… there’s legal means, there’ cultural means, there’s activist means… maybe how we do it is to code in those areas in which earth should be making changes (pauses), in that way it’s not enforced but it is encoded. we can both speak, make changes, and respond to what we’re hearing?

What can we do? Encode the earth’s response in human systems (especially data systems) so that humans can ‘hear’ the earth in conversation, and decide to make change. There’s incentivized (carbon credits), automated (control the tractor / methods), enforced (taxes, etc.), and voluntary (people’s personal beliefs).

What is the earth interface… how does the earth make itself known through ecosystem services?

How do you get information out of users (earth as user).
How are you in conversation with something like the earth?

  1. observe them (sensory info, sensor info)
  2. feedback on change, non-verbal communication (eventually the earth just shuts things down).
  3. Identifying feedback before we get to shut down stage - Tracking Discomfort (how are we supposed to understand what these thresholds are?)
  4. Realize our limitations of language…

Jamie - modeling where outputs (from the earth) connect with inputs (changes to human behavior) and identifying those points…

What is our society / communities / demanding from us, in our current (post-truth, etc.) era. For creating ecosystem service markets, scientific instruments, etc.

What are the pragmatic user needs? Hold a user that you are currently relating to or building for.

  • understanding complex systems and change in operations
  • (persona: farmers) use their existing systems
  • (persona: farmers) miminal time on all things, positive feedback ideally in real time
  • (persona: users) want to feel like their part of the solution.
  • (persona: brands) global solutions
  • (persona: small holder farmers) access to basic information
  • (persona: farmers) clear cost benefit
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Dorn, Christian, Ian

  • What does the world demand of our tech?

    • distill data for future ag – a proper distillation will:
      1. minimize energy expenditures and impacts in the world
      2. improve soil health
    • Tech should inform people about their world and help them understand
      their environment and impact
    • make the invisible, visible, and valuable

  • What do users need?

    • consumer wants their values reflected in the purchases from producers.
    • our tech should foster processes/systems that:
      1. sustain farmer livelihoods
      2. provide food for an exploding world population
      3. reduce GHG emissions

  • How to actively reconnect with this North Star

    • Living on a farm, and seeing the actions happen.
    • Timescale of reflection upon how actions have changed and their
      impacts are long and difficult to observe without taking a step back.
    • Data validation and manually stepping through data pipelines

  • What’s at stake

    1. Planet
      Fail:

      • Catastrophic Climate Change impacts: famine, mass extinction

      Success:

      • Life of all kinds continues to flourish.

    2. Humanity
      Fail:

      • extensive human suffering

      Success:

      • Pull humanity together to break bread and achieve manageable climate change

    3. Individual
      Fail:

      • hunger, relocation, or death

      Success:

      • Personal fullfilment
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We also discussed an ultimate vision of the ‘self driving farm’ like the self driving car that knows how to deliver the best sustainability outcomes. So, the self drive algorithms are the ‘Code Earth’ that protects and regenerates eco system services whilst maximising marketable food.

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